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The National Primate Liberation Week should be renamed “Let’s Keep Humans Suffering Week,” as its goal is to end medical research on monkeys and other primates.

If we did that, tremendous strides to alleviate human suffering would be thwarted.  Here is just a very short and partial list of research on monkeys, most about which I have written, that has led to—or offers great hope for—the alleviation of tremendous human suffering:


It’s not pleasant to contemplate, but primate research is vitally necessary to the advance of human medicine. As Dr. Edward Taub told me in my research for A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy:
“We have two sides of the scale to ponder,” he told me.  “On one side is the real and potential hope that animal research offers to countless suffering human beings.  On the other, is the difficult knowledge that obtaining many of these benefits means that some animals will be harmed.” Taub has it exactly right. Animal rights/liberationists believe that monkeys matter as much as stroke victims and children with disabilities.  People like Taub and this author believe that the suffering of animals is a serious issue that should never be considered lightly or undertaken for frivolous reasons.  But alleviating the suffering of human beings and promoting human thriving matters most.  That, in a nutshell, is the nub of the entire animal rights debate

That is indeed the unpleasant choice.  Of course the projects should be carefully designed. Of course, they should comply with the Animal Welfare Act.  Of course, they should not be done frivolously.  But in the end, I choose humans.


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